{"id":10664,"date":"2015-02-12T16:12:29","date_gmt":"2015-02-12T21:12:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=10664"},"modified":"2015-02-19T11:05:17","modified_gmt":"2015-02-19T16:05:17","slug":"dvd-nightcrawler-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/?p=10664","title":{"rendered":"DVD: Nightcrawler (2014)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"Nightcrawler2014\"<\/a>Film<\/strong>: Very Good<\/p>\n

Transfer<\/strong>: \u00a0Excellent<\/p>\n

Extras<\/strong>: Standard<\/p>\n

Label:\u00a0<\/strong>Elevation Pictures<\/a><\/p>\n

Region:<\/strong>\u00a01 (NTSC)<\/p>\n

Released:<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0February 10, 2015<\/p>\n

Genre:<\/strong>\u00a0 Drama \/ Black Comedy<\/p>\n

Synopsis:<\/strong>\u00a0A socially challenged quick study finds his ideal calling is a late night shooter, filming and eventually manipulating gruesome accidents and crime scenes for a third-rate L.A. news channel.<\/p>\n

Special Features:<\/strong>\u00a0 Featurette: “If it Bleeds, it Leads: Making Nightcrawler” (5 mins.)<\/span><\/p>\n

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Review:<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Dan Gilroy\u2019s tale of Lou Bloom, a sleazy after hours cameraman who races to traumatic scenes to shoot gory footage of dead \/ dying victims of car crashes, gunplay, or home invasions has some trouble settling into a specific tone; it never matures into a suspense drama, action film, or black comedy, but what grounds Nightcrawler<\/strong> is Jake Gyllenhaal, who dropped serious pounds and looks like a starving, wide-eyed rodent \u2013 the kind of nocturnal sleazebag you\u2019d expect to see sitting in his car, tracking police radio reports, waiting to film the imminent carnage that\u2019ll bring him thousands of dollars and a sexy new set of ENG gear.<\/p>\n

Bloom is a huckster; he\u2019s able to snatch props, restyle himself, and through persistent bragging and bullshitting, he eventually gets lucky and inserts himself into a profession he rapidly realizes he was born to excel and thrive. He\u2019s a liar, an opportunist, and a manipulator who uses innocent victims as props to recompose scenes to suit his visual scheme, and it\u2019s only natural he advances to staging events that cause further carnage at a time and place of his design, caught with a two-camera setup.<\/p>\n

An equivalent story of an emerging master manipulator is Jan Egelson\u2019s Shock to the System<\/strong> (1990), in which a hen-pecked husband kills his mouthy wife, and then realizes he can use his gift for staging and manipulating events and people to further his goal to become a corporate chief. Shock<\/strong>\u2019s career-hungry villain is amusing, a little lovable, dry, darkly verbose, and he quickly assesses himself as a modern magician, whereas Bloom is crude around the edges, less deft and socially inept, yet through plenty of teasing and bullying, he entices the news director of a third-rate station to keep him on retainer, and engage a gullible kid as his personal assistant \/ navigator \/ impromptu valet parking attendant with faux promises of a possible permanent career spot in his \u2018company.\u2019<\/p>\n

Two flawed character designs stand out in Gilroy\u2019s script. It\u2019s a bit tough to believe Bloom and news director Nina Romina (Rene Russo) can tumble into a sexual \/ professional relationship (there\u2019s a sense Gilroy shot but later excised scenes from the final cut, since their union moves from Romina\u2019s outright rejection to an almost stealth acknowledgement by Bloom in a heated bargaining match); and assistant Rick (Dead Set<\/strong><\/a>\u2019s Riz Ahmed) may be the most gullible intern in the city, working two months for a paltry $30 \/ night, and never suspecting he\u2019s being conned as slave labour, even after Bloom upgrades from a shit box hatchback to a sleek red performance roadster so the pair can race faster than rival camera crews to a news scene.<\/p>\n

Gilroy\u2019s plotting also gets a little wayward around the hour mark: the film downshifts to a less intense plain after Bloom becomes an established shooter; and the seeding of details culminating in the finale aren\u2019t hard to spot, especially to those familiar with the bad cop \/ master manipulator figure in Mike Figgis\u2019 corrupt cop suspenser Internal Affairs<\/strong> (1990).<\/p>\n

In the DVD\u2019s making-of featurette (the lone extra on this bare bones disc), Gilroy describes Bloom as an extreme version of a kid raised on the internet rather than human interaction, lacking any empathy for anything except the lone plant in his dark apartment; Gyllenhaal regards Bloom as a coyote \u2013 a creature seen only when it\u2019s just killed, or is poised to kill.<\/p>\n

Gilroy\u2019s film is bolstered by a fine cast of character actors, great cinematography by Robert Elswit (Boogie Nights<\/strong>, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol<\/strong>), and sharp editing from twin brother John Gilroy. Brother Tony Gilroy also co-produced, and all three siblings had previous collaborated in various forms on the Bourne franchise. The Gilroys also seemed aware that eschewing the ADD editing of The Bourne Supremacy <\/strong>(2004) ensured their car chases would be snappy, believable, and coherent.<\/p>\n

James Newton Howard\u2019s score is very low key, frequently bleeding in and out of scenes, and his reliance on bass tones and ambient material evoke that weird period in the early morning hours when there\u2019s no sense of time or place \u2013 just a feeling you\u2019re trapped in a nightmare world for an undetermined period.<\/p>\n

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\u00a9 2015 Mark R. Hasan<\/p>\n

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External References:<\/strong>
\nEditor’s Blog<\/a> — IMDB \u00a0<\/a>— \u00a0Soundtrack Album<\/a> — Soundtrack Review<\/a> —\u00a0Composer Filmography<\/a>
\n\u00a0<\/span>
\nVendor Search Links:<\/strong>
\nAmazon.ca<\/a>\"\" \"\" —\u00a0<\/span> Amazon.com<\/a>\"\" \"\" —\u00a0<\/span> Amazon.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dan Gilroy\u2019s tale of Lou Bloom, a sleazy after hours cameraman who races to traumatic scenes to shoot gory footage of dead \/ dying victims of car crashes, gunplay, or home invasions has some trouble settling into a specific tone; it never matures into a suspense drama, action film, or black comedy, but what grounds Nightcrawler is Jake Gyllenhaal, who dropped serious pounds and looks like a starving, wide-eyed rodent…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[18],"tags":[3379,3376,1455,3377,3378],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8nuyW-2M0","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10664"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10664"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10664\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10779,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10664\/revisions\/10779"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kqek.com\/mobile\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}